Chapter 7 Studies And Terms Flashcards
Fazio and Williams Study: Election
-5 months before Reagan and Mondale 1984 election
-measured how long it took participants to indicate attitude toward Reagan
-those who responded quickly to attitude question showed greater consistency between their attitude and how they ultimately voted compared to those who responded relatively slow
-example of response latency
Affect Definition
(Emotion): how much someone likes or dislikes an object - nearly every object triggers some degree of positive or negative emotions which constitutes the affective component of the attitude someone has towards it
Cognitions
Thoughts that typically reinforce a person’s feelings (include knowledge and beliefs about the object, and associated memories and images
Behaviours
(Specific behaviours): affective evaluation of good versus bad is connected to a behavioural tendency to either approach of avoid (attitudes alert us to rewarding objects we should approach and to costly or punishing objects we should avoid)
-when specific attitudes are brought to mind (primed) people are more likely to behave in ways consistent with the attitude
Ito, Cacioppo, and colleagues study: pictures
-P’s primed with positively valences pictures or negatively valences pictures - as they looked at them, experimenters recorded the participants’ brain activity on scalp and studied brain regions known to be involved in evaluative responses to stimuli
Discovered a clear negative bias in evaluation: negative stimuli generated greater brain activity than positive or neutral stimuli
LaPiere study: Chinese Tourists
-toured US with young Chinese couple - went to many hotels, camp grounds, restaurants, and cafes
-thought prejudice and discrimination against Chinese individuals were common at the time, his travel companions were denied service by only 1 of 250 establishments they visited
-LaPiere emailed all establishments to ask about whether their policy was to serve “orientals” - about 90% said they wouldn’t - suggests attitudes don’t predict behaviour very well
Situationists view of Attitudes
-say attitudes don’t always win out over these other determinants, hence attitudes aren’t always tightly connected to behaviour
-eg. understanding of the prevailing norms of the appropriate behaviour can determine how a person reacts and weaken the relationship between their attitudes and behaviours
-eg. hotel and restaurant owners in LaPiere’s study may have wanted to turn away Chinese people, but didn’t out of concern for how it would look and the scene it would cause
Timothy and Wilson study: dating
-asked students about the person they were dating
-one group: gave an overall evaluation of their relationship
-other groupL listed reasons they felt the way they did and then gave overall relationship evaluation
-contacted participants again 9 months later and asked about status of relationship
-attitudes of participants in first group (who evaluated relationship without considering reasons) were much more accurate predictors of their current relationship status than the attitudes of the participants who had introspected about their reasons for liking their partner
-thinking about reasons we like someone can mislead our true, full attitude toward the person making attitude we report after generating reasons not a good predictor of subsequent behaviour
Contaminating Effect of Introspection
-occurs in times when the true source of our attitude is hard to pin down, as when basis of attitude is largely affective (emotional) - here a cognitive thoughtful analysis is likely to seize on seemingly plausible but misleading cognitive reasons
LaPiere’s study and predicting attitudes
-attitudes expressed by various merchants were rather general: whether they would serve orientals
-behaviour assessed was directed at one specific Chinese couple with specific demeanour and dressed in specific fashion - results may have been different if LaPiere had asked merchants whether they would serve a well-dressed pleasant Chinese couple
-if you want to predict a specific type of behaviour accurately, you have to measure people’s attitudes toward that specific behaviour
Lord, Lepper, and Mackie study: Gay Men
-male college students expressed attitudes about gay men
-researchers also elicited from each student his stereotype of the “typical” cay man
-two months later - different experimenter asked p’s if they would be willing to show visiting students around campus - one visitor described in way that participants would think he’s gay
-half of participants got description that was crafted to fir their specific stereotype, other half got a general description
-found that students willingness to show guy around campus (their behaviour) was strongly predicted by their attitudes about gay men (those with positive attitudes said they were willing; those with negative attitudes weren’t - but only if guy matched their prototype of a gay individual
-if he didn’t fit their image, attitudes about gay people didn’t predict their behaviour (willingness to show him around campus)
Predicting attitudes from behaviour
Behaviour can powerfully influence attitudes
-people tend to bring their attitudes in line with their actions
Cognitive Consistency Theory
-maintains that impact of behaviour on attitudes reflects powerful tendency we have to justify or rationalize our behaviour and to minimize any inconsistencies between attitudes and actions
Knox and Inkster Study: racetrack bettors
-interviewed bettors at racetrack, some just before and some just after placing bets
-predicted that act of placing bet and irrevocably choosing particular horse would cause bettors to reduce dissonance associated with chosen horse’s negative features and positive features of competing horse
-dissonance reduction should be reflected in greater confidence on part of those interviewed right after placing bets, once rationalization has set in
-bettors who we’re interviewed right before placing bets gave horses on average a “fair” chance of winning; those interviewed after betting gave horses on average a “good” chance of winning
Frenkel, Doob; Regan and Kilduff studies: dissonance thoughts
In elections: voters express greater confidence in their candidates when interviewed after they’ve voted than when interviewed right beforehand
Effort Justification
-tendency to reduce dissonance by justifying time, effort, or money devoted to something that turned out to be unpleasant or disappointing
Aronson and Mills study: sex discussion
-students told no everyone can speak freely about topic, so potential participants had to pass screening test to join group
-control condition: read aloud a list of innocuous words to the male experimenter
-“mild” initiation condition: read aloud a list of mildly embarrassing words associated with sex
-“severe initiation” condition: read list of obscene words and passage from novel describing sexual intercourse
-participants all told they passed screening test and could join the group
-group were told to just listen to discussion - in headphones in nearby cubicle they heard a boring discussion of the sex life of invertebrates
-investigators predicted discussion would be boring and disappointing to all participants but would produce dissonance only for those who underwent severe initiation to join the group
-reduced dissonance by convincing themselves that the group and discussion weren’t so boring after all
-indeed, those in severe initiation condition rated quality of the discussion more favourably than those in other two conditions
-example of effort justification
The idea effect
-in these studies participants assembled ikea boxes and lego sets and then all participants indicated how much they would pay for their own product, a prebuilt product, or someone else’s finished product
-self-built product: 78 cents - was worth 48 cents if built by someone else
-for lego set: prebuilt set: 32 cents for own set, bid on someone else’s set: 26 cents
-for participant built set: 84 cents for self-built, 42 cents for partner’s set
-difficulty to acquire finished product when you build it yourself made people justify their effort with evaluating product more positively and charging more for it
Pain as a function of payment study
-P’s rated how much subjective pain they felt and emotional attachment felt toward mug when paying for it with either cash (for which a loss of money is more vivid and concrete) vs. Credit card (abstract; less painful)
-how painful is it to pay for a mug on a scale of 0-5
-with cash: 4.09
-with card: 2.10
-what minimum price would you sell the mug for?
-cast: $6.71
-card: $3.83
Induced compliance
When people are induced to behave in a manner that’s inconsistent with their beliefs, attitudes, or values
-most people feel discomfort with the mismatch between behaviour and attitudes
-one way to deal with it: change original attitudes
Festinger and Carlsmith study: experimental drudgery (mundane tasks)
-participants in control condition engage in mundane tasks for an hours - immediately after are asked to rate how much they enjoyed the experiment (gave quite low ratings)
-2 other conditions also had participants do boring tasks but were told experiment involved how performance on task is influenced by expectations about it before hand - participants were lead to believe they were in a control “no expectation” condition but that other subjects were told beforehand that experiment was interesting or boring
-P’s were told to tell participant that was coming in that the study was interesting (P was offered $1 or $20 to deliver this message) - nearly every participant agreed
-when participant who was paid $1 to do the task later evaluated their experience, they rated it highly compared to those in other conditions - they rationalized their behaviour by changing their attitude about the task they had performed (couldn’t justify that they committed act of saying it was good for only the money so they had to change their attitude)
-takeaway: if you want to persuade people to do something and you want them to internalize the broader message behind the behaviour, use smallest amount of incentive or coercion necessary to get them to do it
Aronson, Carlsmith, Freedman, and Lepper Study: Forbidden Toy
-kids shown set of 5 toys and had to say how much they liked each one - experimenter left and said while he was gone kids could play with all toys but their 2nd favourite
-half of kids told not to play with toy because experimenter would be annoyed if they did (mild threat)
-if kid played with forbidden toy experimenter would be very angry and would have to take all the toys and kid would have to go home and never return (severe threat)
-no kids played with forbidden toy
-predicted that not playing with toy would produce dissonance, but only for kids in mild condition
-for all children - not playing with toy was inconsistent with fact it was highly desirable — but for those who received severe threat, severity of threat justified not playing with toy
-kids who received mild threat didn’t have much justification for not playing with toy - this produced dissonance and they likely would resolve the inconsistency by devaluing the toy and convincing themselves they didn’t like it
-children re-evaluated all 5 toys when experimenter cam back
-severe threat kids either didn’t change rating or liked it even more than before
-many kids in mild threat viewed toy less favourably
-severe punishment - put’s off want to do thing for a short time, mild punishment changes kids attitudes and deters them from wanting to do the thing they wanted to do
We ought to experience dissonance when we act in ways that are inconsistent with our core values and beliefs and:
- The behaviour was freely chosen
- The behaviour wasn’t sufficiently justified
- The behaviour had negative consequences
- The negative consequences were foreseeable
Pascal’s Wager
The birth of cost-benefit analysis and cognitive consistency theory
Cost-benefit analysis: comparing the total expected costs and benefits of different options and choosing accordingly
Cognitive consistency theory: if you behave in line with what you want to believe, beliefs will change to match behaviour